


i live in a hologram with you

by radiants



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst, F/F, Pining, a metric ton of sexual tension, also a lot of emotionally charged driving and dissatisfying parties, and raven just has a lot of gay that she doesn't know where to put, octavia is a lowkey manic pixie dream girl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-19
Updated: 2015-10-19
Packaged: 2018-04-27 01:55:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5029213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radiants/pseuds/radiants
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only expected thing about Octavia was her departure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i live in a hologram with you

**Author's Note:**

> written for [the hundred rare pairs](http://thehundredrarepairs.tumblr.com/). unbeta'd (aka let me know if you find any tragic mistakes). title from ["buzzcut season" by lorde](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pstVCGyaUBM/).

Octavia swung into Raven’s life twelve hours late, yet somehow far too early. 

Or, her dorm room, rather. A shard of the outside noise had pierced her apartment, hollering fratboys and honking cars extending into the too-small kitchen. Raven had brandished a baseball bat, hefting it on her shoulder with furrowed brows, refusing to acknowledge how her sweat-slicked fingers slipped on the handle from nerves. She could probably tell you the exact pattern of her own footsteps, inching around the corner, as the city lights from the outside dappled the ugly cream walls. 

Raven could probably tell you the precise wooden plank that Octavia’s cheap high heel had pressed onto as she ducked in through the little window. Octavia was some sort of apparition to Raven from the start; all wild green eyes that were always in some place that she physically wasn’t, seemingly endless golden legs striding in and out of whomever’s life she pleased. The world seemed to follow Octavia around like static, the knowing curve of her mouth a beacon in the blackened air. 

Little did they know she had tendencies that usually ended up in her leading people off of a metaphorical cliff. 

“Woah there, put that down.” 

She didn’t even sound afraid. That should have been the warning flag. 

“Get the hell out of my apartment.” 

Raven’s voice, belonging to the girl wielding the weapon, was far more fear-ridden than the other girl’s. More flags. 

“Can’t do that, sorry,” the girl had said, shucking off her shoes and flopping down on the couch. “Raven, right? Octavia." 

Her slender hand was poised in the air as if she were waiting for something to land in her hand. And Raven knew exactly who she was. She decided to stuff away this prior knowledge hastily, lowering the bat. Pretending to hate the self-satisfied grin that seemed to bloom further at her resignation. Stiffly reaching out to clasp, then shake. 

"Don't know if you heard, but we're roommates now," Octavia went on, picking up the remote from the armrest of the couch and plowing on past Raven's startled expression. "Your old one just wasn't made for this, huh?" The comment tugged on something in Raven's chest briefly, and although she'd never admit it, her confirmation of this fact was quiet. 

Her old roommate, Harper, had taken an entire container of Advil as Raven had been nursing a neck ache from staring down at her exam work and sipping on a flat cherry Pepsi. They were in the thick of testing, not a student on campus to be seen without dusky grey shadows underneath their eyes. On Harper's worst days, she listened to Radiohead. On her best, Oasis. 

Radiohead had been thrumming through the walls for four hours and Raven had finally lifted herself from the couch to borrow a textbook.

She had found Harper limp in their room with Fake Plastic Trees echoing eerily off of the walls, an empty pill container glinting in the fluorescent light. 

Harper ended up fine, physically. They pumped the drugs from her system and plastered her sad face on the local newspaper with headlines asking if colleges were too hard on kids, even though adults would find more important things to spend brainpower on in a week. 

Raven attempted to redirect her own brainpower to the girl lying like a fifties movie star on the beaten couch, maneuvering to fill in the blanks. 

"Something like that. You?"

This particular blank was already filled in for Raven. For everyone. Raven didn't think there was anyone on the planet who didn't know that Octavia was the first to be kicked out of a sorority here.

For sleeping with a sorority member's boyfriend. In the girl's room.

Octavia just smiled coyly, as if she knew, as if the curve of her mouth was bending under the force of her knowing. "Later, Raven." And that was that. Her legs swung over the side of the couch and with a series of clicks, she and her absurd shoes and maddening mouth slipped through the window into the frothing nightlife. 

The window snapped shut behind Octavia. Raven stood there among the ghosts and the silence left in her wake, staring at the remote lying on the couch, the only proof that Octavia had been there in the first place.

*

At precisely 8:42 in the morning, she returned, through the window again. Octavia bore a plastic grocery bag and a flimsy paper tray of coffees that was slumping under the weight of four drinks, or it just appeared that way next to Octavia. She was somehow bright-eyed and had swapped her boa constrictor of a dress for jeans and a leather jacket, soft wisps of brown hair falling from her ponytail that caught the light.

"You're up," Octavia acknowledged, plucking the coffees from the tray and sliding one towards Raven. Raven willed herself to stop looking. "You really need to stop fucking doing that. Don't you have a key?" Octavia laughed and the sun swayed in the sky like an ornament. "Sure," she said, as if her answer explained everything and Raven should have caught the explanation tucked in there somewhere. 

Raven offers nothing but an eyeroll, twisting the drink around in her hand. 

"What is this?" 

Octavia glanced up from hers and brushed her hair off of her shoulder, quirking an eyebrow as if they had the best secret. 

"This, is just coffee," she began, pulling miscellaneous things out of the grocery bag, "that is destined for greatness." 

Octavia heaved the blender out from the cabinet and splashed coconut water in it, not bothering to look up at Raven as she spoke. Three pieces of asparagus fell into the coconut water and Raven watched with curiosity alongside a remote sense of horror as ginger, banana, and finally, their two coffees joined the mix. "What the hell, I was going to-" Octavia cranked on the blender before Raven could finish, causing her temper to crackle slightly. "Oh, don't worry," Octavia hollered over the blender's tantrum, "you'll still get to drink it."

The chaos and noise swelled to fill the room, the corners reverberating in the thunder, and Raven stood alone with Octavia in the midst of the maelstrom. She had a sudden impending feeling, like when you leave the house thinking you've forgot something, but you still leave anyway.

They locked eyes briefly and Octavia switches off the blender. The chattering of birds outside suddenly sounded harsh and thunderous. 

"You're welcome," Octavia declared as she passed a plastic cup filled to the brim to Raven. 

Raven took it with two fingers, the space between her eyebrows pinching disdainfully. Octavia raises her cup like she's holding a toast to some miracle they've both been waiting for, draws it to her lips, and keeps her gaze trained directly on Raven's as she drinks. As if under a trance, Raven follows suit. 

And spits up in the sink less than a minute after. 

“Honestly, what fresh hell - ”

“What did it taste like to you?”

“Betrayal.”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic.”

“I thought you were giving me a coffee!”

Laughter bubbles up from Octavia’s throat and cancels out the string of curse words that were about to rise from Raven’s. She answers Raven’s question before Raven even asks it, even though it felt like Raven’s words were surging up quickly and Octavia’s ambled at her own pace. “The finest hangover cure known to the country, discovered by yours truly.” Raven waded through her own mess of murky wonder and disgust enough to reach her internal light switch, flick on her brain again, and scoff. “I think there are probably greater titles to claim?” Raven’s sentence comes out bent to the shape of a question and she despises it with every part of her being. Octavia just lets her mouth and eyebrows quirk simultaneously. “Good enough for me.” 

There’s a beat of silence before Raven sloshes the abundant remains of the concoction into the sink, glancing briefly at the appearance of the ugly drink against the stainless steel. She related. 

“I don’t even have a hangover,” Raven starts unnecessarily, not sure where her firecracker temper had gone for a vacation. Octavia took a swig of her cure and grinned, wiping her mouth with two fingers in a way that should have been disgusting. “Oh, what, you don’t wanna drink this just for fun? I’m both shocked and offended.” She sorted the groceries into their respective cabinets as she spoke, unlike Raven, because her life moved swiftly on past Raven and her taste bud-related woes. Raven pressed her pointer finger into the rim of the cup hard enough to form a white line. 

“Hey, you got a car, right?” 

Raven’s curt answer is barely out of her mouth before Octavia continues on. “Drive me to a thing tomorrow? Big brother took mine, and my bike.” 

Raven barked out a laugh and soaked in the relief of sounding more like herself as she did so. “What, am I your designated driver now? I’m only a year or two older than you, kiddo. I can work an iPhone and everything just like you kids.” 

“Great, so you’ll do it.”

“I never said that.”

“But you didn’t say no, so. Dropping me off at 5 o’clock PM, picking me up at 4 o’clock AM.”

“Like hell I am. That’s eleven goddamn hours at one party.”

“Fine. 2 o’clock, deal.”

Raven tried to arrange the face she used when her friends busted some electronic or machine and needed her to fix it. The face she used when she was pretending to mind. Octavia took that as an answer and lifted her eyebrows twice, spinning on her pretty heels and sipping her not-so-pretty drink as she drifted into her room. The door snapped shut in her wake. Raven wasn’t even sure she saw Octavia touch the door. 

She doesn’t point out that Octavia didn’t invite her.

*

The first time they drive is at the hands of Octavia’s request, and at 5 o’clock PM Octavia is perched in the sweating, cheap black leather of Raven’s passenger seat. The car is muddled with the heat of the sun left to thicken restlessly in the absence of Raven and the sleeping air conditioner. Raven barely notices.

She does notice Octavia’s slim thighs and the small car console forming the Great Wall of China between them, Raven’s denim covered leg pressed against it subconsciously. She definitely notices. 

Somewhere in the midst of Raven’s aggressive noticing, Octavia has punched the button to switch on the radio with her thumb, pretentious college radio music emanating in response to her touch. Raven pictures music thrumming from everywhere Octavia comes into contact with. Octavia tapping a tree with one slender finger, drawing Top 40 from it. The sidewalk pulsing with frothy dubstep under her feet. Violins lilting shrilly from the oxygen winding it’s way in and out of her small electric figure. At concerts she attends, nobody can even hear the artist themselves because the floor has begun swoon with music and douse the room in gold. 

Raven blinks. 

“I basically know how to get there by sight, so whenever you’re ready, captain,” Octavia drawls, propping her arm against the door and resting the side of her head in her hand. Raven offers a half-assed eyeroll that gets a not entirely dissatisfying laugh from Octavia and they’re on their way. 

“What is this thing, anyway?” Raven doesn’t bother keeping her tone casual. She never has. “That you’re going to, I mean.”

“A party. You know, those things where you-”

“I know what party is, Jesus.”

“You sure?”

“If I’m gonna babysit you, I think I should know what your gameplan is,” Raven half-teases, not even nonchalantly grabbing the conversational steering wheel and veering onto her original course. It’s a comeback fired from Raven’s artillery of phrases to be snapped and used to puncture, except without those intentions. Raven’s not sure why she lost them, but Octavia’s cheekbones sift out of her features as she snorts and Raven knows why.

“Don’t worry, Mom, just an excursion.”

They pull up to a house with music spilling messily from the windows, the bass puncturing holes in the nighttime soundlessness. Raven briefly wonders how any of these people will hear the music over Octavia. Octavia pops open the door and ducks out. 

“Just don’t count on me making curfew.”

She’s gone. It’s not even a seductive phrase, yet against all logic, there’s a white-hot heat coiling tight in places inside of Raven that she can’t see. 

Raven plants a foot on the gas pedal and keeps her eyes glued to the headlight-drowned road in front of her and her mind glued to other places. The space between her eyebrows is tensed and subdues the college radio. It makes no difference. The car was dead, clean silence the moment the passenger door had closed.

*

The weekends after that one fell into symmetry, always starting and ending the same way.

Friday nights were flatironed hair and anticipation and heartbeats, from both ends, both girls, for their own separate reasons. Raven would drive Octavia to her destination of the night every Friday evening. She’d agonize in the car on the way home, and when she arrived, attempt to read or even break something just to fix it and send her mind to other places. This was followed by passing out on the couch only to have her phone alarm extend an arm into her dream and shake her awake to go pick up Octavia, who would slide in, looking like the night had doused her and changed her colors. Raven pretended not to look. 

Saturday mornings Octavia would come in through the window, only ever the window, bearing coffees. She would exit for class with her strange cleanse in her hand. Octavia always, always, made one for Raven, even though Raven never drank them. 

Saturday nights Octavia caught the evening city breeze and rode it to wherever it took her. After consecutive Saturdays of staring after her with furrowed brows she eventually figured out that Octavia went into the night just to be in it, to layer the pulse with her heartbeat. 

Sundays involved sleep. A lot of it. And Octavia had obtained a profound ability to curl up and sleep wherever was available if she put her mind to it. 

(Raven never got any rest herself when she was around.)

And Raven found herself and her abilities always a little warped, her pulse a little flightier, when Octavia was present, in thought or physically - like a version of Raven revised specifically for Octavia was speaking instead of Raven herself. The reason for this was like a feeling of seeing something in your peripheral vision, but not wanting to turn around and look stupid because it might not even be there. But there was always the inevitable with Octavia, the dips in conversation when Raven found herself mysteriously at a loss for words, the salt-slicked palms, that looming figure at the corner of Raven’s eye. 

Naturally, she needed answers.

Raven had always considered herself a woman of science, and soon enough she found herself testing her hypothesis. Measuring the rise and fall in speed of her heartbeat when Octavia was around as opposed to when she wasn’t. Testing the cups within her of swelling wanting and needing with a Ph strip to see if they were what they said.

Weighing the difference in the amount of eye contact she could manage when Clarke asked her how her outfit looked compared to that one time Octavia did. 

(She had looked like the season of summer was about to knock on their dorm room door and ask Octavia for pointers on being beautiful. She looked like a constellation would waltz up ten minutes after asking if she wanted to be the replacement for a star that exploded. She looked like - never mind.)

Raven’s realization of her crush on Octavia should have felt like she was uncapping a pen to mark down the date for the apocalypse on her calendar. The truth was, Raven felt peace she hadn’t felt for the past three weeks, unfamiliar still waters in her gut. Science was balance for her and now she could stop teetering on the edge of being socially inept whenever Octavia was so much as standing twenty yards away because she had answers.

Or, most of them. After all, the substance of Octavia’s very existence was questions.

*

Dawn was stretching it’s pale arms open wide across the sky and Raven is at the delicate fingertips, waiting for Octavia.

It was 5 AM and the house that Octavia had entered last night seems to stretch up much taller than Raven had remembered it looking when she had dropped Octavia off. 

Raven relaxes her fingers on the steering wheel and reminds herself who she is. She’s Raven, and although she’d found herself a little out of touch with herself lately, one thing she thought she’d always be in touch with was her courage. If not that, then her ability to pretend. To put up a fight. 

So with a brow that had been furrowed for hours now and not even an exhale in preparation, Raven stepped out of the car, straightened her top, lifted her chin. She descended into whatever she needed to do to find Octavia. 

If it were at the very walls of the atmosphere, so be it. 

She never met the walls of the atmosphere. But Raven essentially walked into post-adolescent perdition, the walls vibrating with morning-after leftovers of bass, abandoned strobe lights still flickering on the ugly floral wallpaper. The air was thick with the scent of various substances and college hormones and the morning breath of the population still there. Somehow, some bodies still swayed, as if in a trance. Raven’s jaw was locked tight. 

Shoving apart a flannel-clad boy and a girl in a tube top, she crushed a red Solo cup under her foot, denying how fast her own heart was beating. These were wastelands, it occurred to her as she noticed a common theme in the people still at the party, revering the echoes of the night before. There was this glint in all of their eyes, heavily intoxicated, as they glanced towards Raven. She didn’t belong here. And they knew. 

These were the remainders, the residue from the former night. The ones who preyed on freshmen and did things they later told the court nobody had any proof of. Raven wondered if this is who Octavia belonged with. 

She decided that was only possible if there was a different Octavia. Octavia couldn’t possibly belong here. 

Which meant that she was not here by her own will. 

Raven jammed her sweaty hands in the pockets of her red jacket, clenching the insides of them. She felt a searing impulse in her hands to get physical with people, a familiar urge, but she didn’t think throwing punches would be useful in this situation.

Until she saw Octavia, golden limbs limp on a couch.

And the two boys craned over her, towering like half-dilapidated buildings about to topple right onto Octavia. Raven didn’t have to speak to them to know Octavia would be lost in the rubble. One of them had their cell phone out, those strange glinting eyes heavy-lidded as the other pinched her lips with a lazy laugh, clearly for the enjoyment of whoever was going to view this later. She couldn’t decide whether Octavia’s lightless eyes were propped open or not. 

Before she could really think, not that she ever did when her temper went white-hot, she heard the sound of her own voice. 

“What the fuck is this.”

The two guys didn’t even so much as swivel their sightless eyes towards her, too drunk and lethargic to move. One of them, a mop of curly hair tucked under a ratty beanie, lifted a shoulder. The other looked a little more defensive. Raven zeroed in on her target. 

“You think screwing with an intoxicated girl s’gonna make your dick bigger? Get to the big leagues, boys.”

Her eyebrows were arched angrily, the words whistling through her lungs. Raven could barely hear herself. There wasn’t a trace of sweat on her hands anymore, curled into half-fists at her sides. She hardly blinked. Her head was inclined to the right and her chin lifted high. This was it, her stance. It had made a generous number of appearances in her life, and Raven would’ve thought that this was the pinnacle, had she not been mid-swing towards the sweet spot of beanie boy’s jaw. 

Her knuckles made contact and she vaguely registered Octavia’s head turning as she snatched the phone from the boy’s hand. The fight was slow moving, the two boys too intoxicated to engage in the type of fights Raven had been used to when she had reasons to fight. They were all slow limbs, and Raven was all of the perfect combination of fight and flight wrapped up in a girl. Both a Raven and a raven. A clashing chorus of the two phrases “Hey, what the fuck” and “You sick bitch!” resounded, and she suddenly grabbed an abandoned cup left in the aftermath of beer pong, still full to the brim with stale beer. The boy’s iPhone dangled precariously between her two fingers.

“Apologize to her. Delete anything you have. Show me that - ”

He punched too quick for her to register, replacing the end of her sentence with a spatter of blood spraying from her mouth. 

“What, are, you two, like fucking?” He snorted. “Dude, they’re fucking. She your dyke? Who tops?”

Raven lifted her head slowly and laughed harshly, the blood against her white teeth stark and inhuman in the dim light. The phone landed in the cup with a plunk.

“Oops.”

Raven crushed the cup with a crackling sound and dropped it carelessly to the ground, contents sloshing everywhere, stamping her boot on top of it and grinding slowly. She barely had time to finish the process before they finally lunged. 

The next two minutes were a blur. They had outmatched her in size, but Raven outmatched them in will and sobriety. The clearest detail she could recall was grappling for the cup-clad phone and aiming for the temple when she swung at beanie boy with it. She might’ve bit the other guy. Or gotten him between the legs, aimed for the jugular, knocked the air out of his stomach. Her father’s self-defense lessons were an incoherent smear of memory in her mind, and it almost seemed wrong here, suddenly a tender thought in the midst of a most untender situation.

Raven’s mental replay button had been completely disabled the minute she stood up, wiping her mouth with her hand and glancing briefly at the streak of shiny crimson it left behind on her skin. Her head thudded, and she could feel premature bruises blooming on various parts of her body. She had won, but there was no way she would’ve ever gotten out spotless.

Raven looked up and found that Octavia was looking at her with an expression she couldn’t read under all of the intoxication clogging up Octavia’s features. 

She gripped Octavia’s wrist and pulled her up, tossing a tan arm over her shoulder. Octavia slurred something in her ear, her mouth smelling like ale and Coca-Cola. Raven couldn’t decipher it. Maybe it had been thank you. Maybe it had been _I love you_ , maybe _I’m sorry_ , maybe _somewhere out there there’s a parallel universe and I know you in it. I know you._ Raven’s eyes suddenly felt reluctantly wet, but she kept walking, a slow limp with Octavia’s slim weight slumped on her side and knocking her proportions off.

Raven planned to get out of this place as soon as humanly possible, so they went around back to where the sprinklers had gone off rather than going into one of the showers in the house. Cold water sluiced down Octavia’s features and her spine erected in the initial temperature shock, then relaxed. Her legs wobbled, so Raven stood behind Octavia and held her upright, toeing the sprinkler to focus on Octavia. 

They stood in the sprinkler for a bit, and Raven only allowed herself to glance at the dress plastered across Octavia’s form in intervals. Raven moved the wet hair sticking to Octavia’s forehead off and felt a nagging, pinching feeling that she was seeing something she wasn’t supposed to see. 

“Hey, um. _Hey_ , hey. What time is it? Do you know?”

All of the vowels were elongated, her voice strange and ambling. There was a quality to it Raven didn’t recognize, and Raven had already witnessed her drunk once or twice before.

“You, you would know. You always know. You know so many things, a lot of things. You know a lot of things.”

“It’s almost 6 AM. We’re going home.”

“Raven, you know so many things, you know that?”

Raven felt oddly on edge. Octavia twisted around in her grasp and laid her hands sloppily on Raven’s cheeks, stumbling back a few steps so Raven had no choice but to fall back under the blanket of sprinkler rain. Octavia laughed. She leaned in and whispered, her mouth touching Raven’s nose. The sound was filmy and Raven had to take everything in her not to break eye contact, for once.

“You don’t know me, though. You don’t know me.”

 

Raven swallows thickly. She has a strange feeling in her peripheral vision that the trees are stretching up high in the dark, looming over the two of them and encasing them, but it doesn’t feel safe. Raven doesn’t notice she’s whispering too when she speaks. 

“Let’s go home.”

When Octavia is deposited in the passenger seat and they started on the road home, she strangely doesn’t fall asleep. Raven didn’t notice that Octavia pressed a chipped but manicured finger to the window button, her arm propped on the passenger door and the side of her head resting on her bent arm lazily. Raven was only aware when the quiet static of the roads in the morning drifted in with the dewy air. She watched as Octavia slowly reached a hand out the window, spreading out her fingers to let the air flow between them. She made a slow, dipping, surfing motion with her hand in the air, entranced. The wind reached out to lift up and drop pieces of her hair.

Raven looked away, turning on the radio. She never found out what Octavia had mumbled in her ear.

*

At 2 AM on a Monday the pale glow of the TV was washing out Octavia and Raven’s faces. Morning TV had an almost ethereal quality to it, no matter how ridiculous the content on the screen might be. It was a brush against a different quality of universe, a strange bubble in space and time, the same feeling you got between when you lie down in your bed to when you finally fall asleep. A descent, somewhere between dreaming and thinking. Their eyes were glassy, and Raven had a half-full water bottle slouched in her half-open hands. Octavia was swamped in a blanket, and Raven’s head leaned against her jacket, a makeshift pillow even though there were several pillows scattered on the ground.

The TV chattered aimlessly, so determined to get what it had to say out there that Raven almost didn’t notice when Octavia first spoke. Almost. 

“Hey, Raven?”

“Yeah.”

“I just remembered I never said thank you.” 

Raven snorted. 

“You’re going to have to be a little more specific than that.”

She felt a dull pang of regret when she witnessed Octavia’s half-withering, half-frustrated expression, and Raven tore her glance away and scratched a fingernail at the residue of her water bottle wrapper. 

“For the other night.”

“Oh. It’s whatever. Designated driver duties, right?”

Raven laughed weakly and Octavia half-smiled, an unreadable curve to her mouth that Raven didn’t really think looked all that happy. 

“You know what we should do sometime?”

“I can’t begin to imagine, Octavia.”

“My friend Lincoln, he’s got a band. A good band, no plagiarized sampling shit. The kind that makes you feel.”

The silence pulsed in time with the staccatos in the midst of the white noise of the TV. It was a struggle for Raven to give her time. She had a sudden feeling they were the only two people awake on the planet.

“We should go see him. My friends, they’re great, but they wouldn’t - they wouldn’t understand. They would see it as an out to get high and talk about riding the bassist or something. Not to use sound to feel.”

Raven raised her eyebrows, tossing out a snark-mangled remark rather than contributing anything useful. There was the usual Raven, back when Raven never wanted her.

“You saying we’re not friends?”

Octavia rolled her eyes, a gesture Raven wanted to inquire further but didn’t, then plowed on to fill in the gaps. 

“He puts himself out there, Raven. No matter what anyone’s going to think about him, his story is in there. The bad parts and the good parts and the endings and the beginnings. Do you know how scary that must be?”

(Raven’s name was a downfall in Octavia’s mouth).

“It’s just - it’s so extraordinary and raw, you know? To not just make art, but to put your whole self in it, no strings attached. I wish I was like that. You can read him in the most - the most unexpected way.”

Raven felt like she was.

The crickets resumed themselves seemingly after Octavia finished. The two of them sat as the only two silent things in the night, their breaths possibly not even real, inhaling and exhaling each others words instead of oxygen. Raven tilted her head to the said, her voice softer than she expected it to for the nature of the word. 

 

“God, as long as it’s not country music.”

Octavia huffed out a laugh, shaking her head in time with the spinning world around her. Raven wasn’t sure whether they continued to lie there for an hour or a minute before Octavia got up, blanket falling around her, catching at her elbows like a princess in an evening shawl. 

“Night, Raven.”

“Night.”

And it was.

*

One of the few consistencies Raven had picked up from within Octavia’s inconsistencies abound was to avoid their apartment on Thursday nights. This agreement was never of spoken word - Raven had heard from a friend that Andrew or Jack or Zach or whatever, the sorority girl’s boyfriend who caused Octavia’s deportment to their current apartment, “visited” Octavia on Thursdays. From when the dry russet leaves dangled from the trees, clinging by a thread, to when the months were overturned to show the gray wintertime at their underbelly, Raven would keep herself occupied. Work out, hang around her friends and pretend they were the ones bothering her, stare blankly at the crowded words on her textbook in a coffee shop somewhere. Anything was better than being on the receiving end of secondhand dirty talk through a shitty dorm wall.

This was why Raven’s heart skyrocketed to the chill core of the earth when she realized she left her USB drive with her essay on it in their apartment. With Octavia. And - Xavier? Ryan? Maybe Alex. No matter. There was no strangled variation of this scenario that ended positively. 

There were a thousand versions of the unwritten horror story in Raven’s head as she crept reluctantly up the stairs, each creak like a note on a funeral organ. She wondered how she got herself into these situations. 

She stood at the door like it was death’s, clasped, turned. Swung the door open wide with a pointed bang against the wall to provide a warning to whatever was going on inside.

Which was Octavia, alone, sweatpant-clad legs curled under her in the couch, holding a box of sushi and looking both startled and even more amused. She was wearing a black cami, collarbones washed in the bright ache of the afternoon winter sun. The heating was cranked all the way up, rushing against Raven’s skin so that the stray hairs of her ponytail shied from the vent. 

Octavia scooched to the side so a blank spot was left on the worn cushion for Raven. 

“The new episode of Game of Thrones is about to be on.”

“Don’t watch it. Do you even watch Game of Thrones?”

“Never too late for us to start.”

Much to her own dismay, Raven obliged, falling beside her and plucking a piece of sushi from Octavia, who looked obnoxiously pleased.

“Heard the new season is shit.”

Octavia shrugged contentedly. 

“The people who watched it from the beginning are the ones with a disadvantage. They have higher standards.” 

Raven rolled her eyes, but she stretched out her legs sideways on the couch. The ultimate and only way she had resolved conflict for the majority of her life was just to put it out there, whether eventually or right away, no matter how painstaking. 

“So. I thought you had a guy here on Thursdays?” 

Octavia’s moving picture of a face poised itself in confusion for a few moments, until recognition flashed over it, her eyebrows relaxing. She laughed. “Matt? I haven’t seen him like that since late September.” The sound of her voice sounded so casual for such a delicate topic as someone else. 

Recognition was a wildfire in Raven’s stomach, the nerves burning under her skin as it swept throughout her. Late September was when Octavia moved in with Raven.

She kept the heat concealed under her skin and tipped her head back against the couch cushion. 

“Got it.”

But she didn’t.

And Octavia laughed again, because she knew.

*

It was a Wednesday when Octavia asked her.

“So. For Friday.”

“What about it?”

“It’s a bigger kind of party than usual.”

Their textbooks were propped open on their laps, legs stretched to opposite ends of Octavia’s bed. Raven would have been hyper-aware that she was on it if it weren’t for the fact that she saw its ghostly presence everyday, papery white sheets tossed about. She never used a comforter. Raven inclined her chin, looking up from the words she wasn’t reading.

“Oh, really? That’s so interesting.”

“Shut up. What I’m saying, is that most of my friends will be there, and it’ll be different than usual. You should come and meet them. It’s gonna be tight.”

Raven’s heart swooped perilously. She hated it, pushing a verbal swing at Octavia’s confidence up from her acidic gut. 

“And then you’ll take me to meet the parents next, right?”

Octavia’s grin was a slash on her skin. Raven was ultimately afraid and challenging of it. 

“So you’re coming?”

Raven tried to picture herself in one of the houses Octavia disappeared to in the night and dreamed hungrily of in the daytime. So solid on the exterior, dreamlike on the interior, once you entered the house. Shimmery trap music that hurt your chest, and Octavia and Raven in the center of it all, glittery eyelids and strangers for hearts. 

“I guess I could slum it for a night with you lowly partiers.”

Octavia grinned, slinging a leg over Raven’s in approval. Raven’s chest compressed, causing her next words to appear more choked than intended.

“But at least take me to dinner first.”

*

Raven heard the music before she even left the house, the pulse of the bass growing ever louder until they reached their destination.

This house was a different breed than the one Raven had saved Octavia from entirely, a beast crouched on its hind legs, foaming at the mouth with glittery EDM.

Raven felt as if she were donning a suit of armor and sword rather than a near-strangling dress and high heels. 

Octavia had carpooled with her friends, promising to meet Raven there. It had ended up being for the best once the initial sting wore off, as in the two hours after Octavia left the house, Raven had been a wreck. Clarke had to come over, help her into her dress, do her makeup and hair while Raven sat like a begrudging toddler (like with most things, she insisted she could do herself), and grip her bony shoulders in two hands and give her an unwanted but all the more necessary pep talk for twenty minutes. 

It wasn’t as if Raven had never been to a party before. She had been to plenty, especially with her exes, aside from Finn, who had a near allergic reaction to a party whenever he went to one despite his constant need to be in the center of the social ring. Raven briefly wondered if Octavia was similar, but the thought was so scary she brushed it off immediately. 

Now, stalking up to the house, chin lifted high, she began to feel oddly more in control with every clicking step towards the house. Raven had never had any doubts that she was pretty. She felt the anonymous, genderless stares of those around her. But this was different. Everything was different, and she knew the sole reason why. 

That sole reason intercepted her when she was halfway to the house, a cloudy pink scent of perfume enveloping Raven as Octavia did. 

“Babe! You look hot. You should come out more often,” Octavia trilled.

A ring of Octavia’s partners in crime surrounded her, Octavia introducing each of them to her, but Raven was too busy thinking in terms of _babe_ and _hot_. 

And then Octavia’s arm was linking in hers, their pulses insistent against each other, and they walked in. 

The sour smell of substance flooded Raven’s system with each inhale, but the first thing she noticed was the pull. The crowd was a liquid substance in itself, a beating heart, pulsating, compressing and expanding, writhing. The hormones drifted high above the heat. The bass layered with Raven’s heartbeat until they matched, and it almost seemed to wrap its long talons around Raven’s core and draw her in. She was brightly aware of Octavia beside her, and she turned to her, their slim hips brushing.

Octavia’s friend (?) Atom, who looked like he wanted to devour them whole in a way that was not even remotely pleasant, pushed a cup into Raven’s hand. She pulled it to her mouth with little thought, thinking that if she was going to do this she would do it right. 

Octavia’s friends didn’t dwindle, Raven was learning alongside what she had learned in the past hour (day? week? time seemed an entirely shapeless entity in here). The majority of the girls had attracted to a miscellaneous or not-so-miscellaneous male or female as if everyone in the room was a magnet, some pulls stronger (or more available) than others. 

In a way that didn’t surprise Raven at all while Octavia accepted a blunt for a minute or two before passing it, Octavia was a beacon in the concoction of too-bright lights and too-dark dark. She obtained a bank’s worth of looks, all of varying measure. Sorority girls glared primly, boys stared darkly, the world turned it’s unseeing eyes to Octavia, who turned to Raven. 

Octavia tapped on Raven’s bottom lip, and Raven opened it without thinking. Dusky smoke poured shortly into Raven’s mouth from Octavia’s. She felt Atom’s breath catch, or maybe it was her own. Raven’s nerves were acutely alive, yet very deeply asleep and out of it. 

Octavia grabbed her wrist and they faded into the crush of bodies. 

Octavia’s body moved like she was where the music came from, directing her body. Raven moved like it was the last time she would ever, desperate and rollicking. Octavia moved ever closer, voice raised above the height of the music, even though it wasn’t necessary. Everyone seemed to subconsciously gravitate forwards towards her whenever she spoke, cracked a joke, commented on the music, pointed out someone. Raven was right. It didn’t matter who started this party, who started her friend group. Octavia held it in the palm of her hand, pretty mouth parted to consume it whole. 

Octavia’s body rolled particularly close to Raven’s. Raven’s heart rolled in the same direction.

 _Move like you stole it_ , the singer of the music wailed incoherently, the electronic thick. Octavia’s feet struck and swept the floor like she was thunder and lightning, the rain and the hail, like she stole it and hid it where no one could find it. Every glance at Raven seemed to be a dare, every drop in the bass and drop of Octavia’s body. 

As if in a dream, the substances livid, turning Raven’s blood shocks of rainbow, Octavia drifted towards her. Glancing sideways at Atom, Octavia’s thighs brushed Raven’s, her face tilted upwards towards Octavia. She grabbed Raven’s hands, guiding them to her sequined waist, their hips rolling slow against each others as if they’d done this together before. Octavia looked at her only briefly, Raven drunkenly noticed. Octavia’s attention was turned elsewhere.

And that’s what didn’t make it right when the cherry-tainted press of Octavia’s mouth met Raven’s. 

Octavia’s demons crawled down Raven’s throat through her mouth. This was not the kiss illuminated by their dorm room window, nor the rushed kiss in the bathroom of a party Octavia finally invited Raven to, that Raven had imagined. No, Octavia’s drug-sour tongue moved in tandem with music Raven suddenly realized she hated. Her hands crawled down Raven’s back almost savagely and her tongue explored Raven’s mouth at a pace that made it wrong. Her hand gripped the back of Raven’s hairspray-sticky head as if to force her there rather than to anchor her there. 

Atom’s body was a shadow behind Raven’s. She stumbled directly into him as she tore herself backward from Octavia. 

“Hey?”

Octavia’s voice was cranked above the volume. Raven hated the sound of it this way. 

“C’mon, babe, you were doing so good.”

Octavia practically purred the words in a way that Raven did not like at all. It was Atom’s nod that made her recognize. 

She whirled on Atom, and then back on Octavia. 

“You don’t get to call me your fucking babe.”

Octavia didn’t look like she had an ounce of intoxication in her veins when she cocked her head, mock pouting, mirroring Atom’s disappointed expression. That was what made it worse.

“What?”

“This is for douchebag over here, isn’t it?”

Atom had nothing to contribute. Except for “it was hot.”

Raven had nothing to contribute but her fist to Atom’s stomach. He doubled over, the oxygen whacked from his lungs. Rightfully so. Octavia grabbed his arm and Raven loaded her gun.

“You fucking listen to me, alright? I am a lot of things, but I am not your goddamn porno costar,” Raven spat.

Octavia was known to be the type of person with a lot of mistakes under her belt, but this was her greatest. Raven was a phoenix awake, a blaze of blistering, angered glory.

A phoenix with a broken heart was a terrifying thing. They did not disperse into ashes, but they thundered. Raven was an earthquake in high heels, a nuclear entity of her own. This was her father’s blood pumping in her veins and her heart wailing so loudly her ribcage rattled. 

“You can find another girl to play footsie with for him, and for all I care, you can find another goddamn roommate.”

Octavia no longer looked magical. She didn’t look like she glowed. She didn’t look like a beacon or a constellation. She looked like a confused little girl who Raven didn’t have time for. 

And then her eyes went cold.

“Fuck you,” Octavia vociferated. Raven smiled cruelly, brokenly. 

“You were right. You’ll never fucking be Lincoln. I don’t have to know him to know that. You don’t have a real bone in your empty body,” Raven thundered.

The music was drained of its pull, now a thrumming storm cloud above Raven’s head as she stumbled through the press of bodies, stepping on a foot or two as hands clamored for her body. She wanted to destroy them. She wanted to drive them into the dirt with Octavia. She wanted to drench this paper house in gasoline and set it on fire, ripping the pieces apart as they curled and blackened with heat.

But when Raven emerged from the house, bare skin prickling in the chill night air, she realized the last truth of that night.

She was not a girl with a sword and suit of armor. She was not a phoenix rising nor an earthquake. 

Raven was a girl who convinced herself she was unbreakable getting her heart broken for the first time in her life.

Raven sat on the cold cement curb, arms folded tight to her chest and shoulders shaking. She waited until the tears stopped, wiping at red raw cheeks. She didn’t try to convince herself she could drive. Less because she was intoxicated, and more because she was all too aware of the fact that she was unbearably tired.

A shadow formed in the glow of the house’s light on the parking lot pavement in front of Raven. She knew whose it was without looking up.

“Raven?”

Octavia was all eyes in the night, like a cat, body in perfect rhythm with the night until it faded in with it. Only her green eyes flashed like precious metal. Raven curled into herself as if she had been punched and gritted her teeth. 

“You know what? Fine,” Octavia snarled primly, and stalked off.

A cab pulled up. Raven didn’t call Clarke because she didn’t think she could bear to be in the car with someone she knew.

Raven slid into the cab. Told the driver where to take her. Exhaustion simmered in her gut. 

In the rearview mirror, she watched that house disappear, the mess of people and hearts and substance churning endlessly, endlessly, Octavia’s face turned up to the distant ceiling somewhere.

*

Raven ignored Octavia.

She ignored her on Saturday. Raven was out of the house, head woozy and heart in a cold knot, and into Starbucks, where she remained until sundown. On her way out, she grabbed the cup of Octavia’s hangover cure she had made for her and sloshed it into the sink. Raven didn’t bother to send it spiraling down the drain, leaving the splattered macabre artwork for Octavia to find.

She ignored her on Sunday when Octavia left her another one. 

She ignored Octavia’s advances via phone. The glow of Octavia’s texts on her screen was immediately assassinated with a flat expression on her face as Raven slid on Do Not Disturb and slid off her longing.

She ignored the past few months pulsating in her peripheral vision and she ignored the insistent sound of Octavia’s hairdryer before she left for class. She ignored the shoulder taps and the tugs at heartstrings and the veins running up and down Octavia’s arms. 

She ignored the sound of the window opening and shutting, Octavia’s indignant footsteps. 

The only time Raven couldn’t ignore her was in dreams, where Octavia spread herself out in Raven’s sleepspace. She dreams of Octavia as a feral cat, stalking around their dorm room to slip out the window one night. She dreams of Octavia kissing her, sending Raven into a jolt of unwelcome awakening. She dreams of Octavia as 10 feet tall and growing, buildings making way for her giant stilettos. She dreams of houses bursting at the seams with college kids until they overflowed, skylights turning the clouds purple, Octavia in the center.

*

[12:31 PM] Octavia Blake: you can’t ignore me forever  
[12:34 PM] Octavia Blake: please

*

The last night Raven ignores Octavia, she dreams of Octavia in one of Raven’s t-shirts, her legs and heart bare. Raven awoke with sweat plastering wispy hairs to her forehead, embarrassment and euphoria echoing the pound of her heart, the sound of Octavia’s laugh perforating her frame of mind for the day.

The real Octavia had become all unsatisfied exhales and indignant, stiff glances, words curated and crafted to shoot straight to Raven’s conscience. She had no power over Raven. 

Dream Octavia was more successful, and the most nightmarish part of it was that she was aware of it. The knowing curve of her mouth, the electric blue power clutched in her fists, was something Raven would not be so lucky as to forget.

*

Thursday night unfolded and Raven had along with it.

When Octavia entered the room past 12, her silhouette stretching across the wall, cookie cutter shadow against dull honey light, Raven wrapped her blankets tighter around her and closed her eyes. Octavia got ready for bed almost painstakingly slow, but a part of Raven knew she wasn’t going to be able to sleep whether Octavia were taking forever or two minutes.

Octavia finally laid down, on her back, and although Raven couldn’t see her, she could picture her eyes on Raven, then the ceiling. 

“I get confused, sometimes,” Octavia whispered to the air.

Despite her former shot at pretending to be asleep, she answers. 

“Yeah.”

*

Octavia was ablaze in the orange-pink fluorescent glow of the 7/11 logo, her skin drenched in color. Raven was a canvas of nerve endings.

It had been Octavia’s idea, of course, to go to 7/11 for a slushie to nurse a sudden craving that had blossomed. Raven, begrudgingly, had agreed. They made a 20 minute drive with a lot of radio station changes and not nearly as much straining tension as Raven thought there would be. 

Then again, Raven wasn’t sure what she thought. 

She supposed a part of her figured they had been at a step on the stairs before the party, and Octavia had sent them toppling down to different levels. That their coming back together, their resolution after the tumultuous climax of their fucked-up storyline would be more of an ascent, less of a falling in, like it was.

And there was no better way to describe it than a falling in. They collapsed back into habit, there was just more knowledge behind it, more grind, more story. They fell back into disgusting hangover cures and snarky conversation and smiles that were both expecting and unknowing at the same time. They fell back into car drives and Raven fell back into Octavia as Octavia fell back into her. Raven told herself that she had only broken her grudge for the benefit of herself as Octavia’s roommate. She told herself that she didn’t care for Octavia anymore, that this venture was a peace treaty in a paper cup, that this was diplomacy. Octavia was an entity that Raven was to keep separated from her life, the difference between fog and clear air maintained. Raven wasn’t sure who was which.

Or so she told herself.

But Raven had never really done diplomacy. 

It’s a terrifying thing when your own soul calls bluff on your thoughts.

Raven watched as Octavia tapped the straw of her slushie against her tongue contemplatively. 

“Satisfied?” 

“No,” Octavia pondered around the straw. 

“High maintenance much?”

Octavia grinned, knife-sharp.

“Maybe. Or I just can tell what I want.”

“You wanted a cup of diabetes at an ungodly hour at night and I delivered. Not sure what else you might want, your Highness.”

“You can’t possibly just forgive me like that, could you?”

Raven didn’t speak. She attempted to regain her footing.

“You literally were fucking begging me to start speaking to you again. And it was boring not talking.”

Octavia shook her head condescendingly, her laugh temporarily struggling for competition against the hum of the electric sign above their heads. It was no surprise which sound emerged victorious. 

“I’m not satisfied because you know I don’t deserve to be talked to right now and you let me do what I want, Raven.”

“Oh? Glad we got this established,” Raven thundered, feeling that disgusting feeling from the party encase her. The fact that there was no alcohol to stunt it made it all the more clear and starkly painful. “I’ll go drive home. Good luck calling your brother and convincing him that isn’t spiked. Have a nice life, Octavia.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, you’re dramatic. Sit down.”

Raven stalked off, shaking her head, her ponytail swaying rhythmically with it. Her feet felt so heavy she thought they pounded against the pavement as she walked. 

“You let me do what I want,” Octavia echoed.

Raven stopped.

“And for the longest time I couldn’t figure out why. Because I didn’t have to know you well to know that’s not how you are with anyone.”

Raven felt outside of her body as she turned. Octavia had stood up, taking steps until she was closer to Raven. They breathed in each other’s air, an invisible see-saw of oxygen, Raven’s exhale and Octavia’s inhale, Octavia’s exhale and Raven’s inhale. 

“I’m not satisfied because I know why you let me do what I want. And because if you’ll let me have what I want, then I can’t let you get away without you letting me do this.”

The press of Octavia’s mouth on Raven’s was cold, sugary and artificial from the slushie.The press of Octavia’s chest on Raven’s was exceedingly not. Now, Raven felt astoundingly present in her own body. 

Their lips separated temporarily. They were technicolor in the nighttime, the 7/11 and the two livid girls in front of it. Raven’s eyes opened. Octavia’s remained closed. 

They were closed the second time they kissed, the third time, the fourth, all in front of that convenience store, Raven’s chest an echoing internal musical of heartbeats. They were closed when Raven sucked in Octavia’s bottom lip and they were closed in the car. They were closed as they held hands on the stick shift, their faces temporarily illuminated by the headlights of each car that passed them, again and again, and again and again.

*

“Octavia, don’t - fuck.”

Octavia looks up. Raven is practically incendiary at the sight.

“Good?”

A maroon tank top strap has fallen from the golden throne of Octavia’s shoulder. Her mouth is borderline purpled, and she’s only otherwise clad in underwear and knee socks (which she had worn for the entirety of the afternoon until Raven was a heatstorm trapped in human skin). This is Octavia. Not through the window Octavia or manic pixie dream girl Octavia. Truer, braver. Honest.

Good. 

Raven cards her fingers through Octavia’s hair insistently, her own brown stomach glistening with sweat illuminated by the digital clock. Octavia runs her lips slowly along the soft skin of Raven’s inner thigh, nipping in a way Raven can only depict as curiously, and Raven’s head hits the couch armrest with a groan.

“Good.”

And then Octavia’s mouth is busy in other ways and Raven’s legs tighten helplessly around Octavia’s head, her mouth a hot springs for profanity, breath sobbing out Octavia’s name.

“I thought you would be this loud.”

Raven’s dry laugh was excessively breathy, and mostly cut short when her brain connected the ends of the circuit and realized Octavia had thought. About this. 

“Hey, Octavia?” She all but huffed.

“Hm.”

“Do me a - a solid, and shut the fuck up, and - yeah.”

*

The fluorescent glow of the clock warned 3 AM and they still lay dangerously tangled on the couch. Raven picked at a strand of Octavia’s hair. She could still smell the artificial raspberry hairspray that coated it.

Their legs were locked together, bodies in a slump, skin sticky. It was early and they would be exhausted, drained things in the morning, blood slow in their veins. Class would be hell.

Raven was supernaturally happy.

Octavia pressed her nose in the dip between Raven’s collarbones, eliciting a pointless laugh from both of them. The silence stewed until Raven was the last dying ember of a coal left in a firepit, formerly ablaze - her eyelids fluttered. Sleep had begun to lull her, and the fact that she didn’t have to be scared of what she dreamt only encouraged her.

It might have been a dream when Octavia spoke, hazy carbon dioxide in the early hours that Raven was slow to decipher. 

“You remember Lincoln?”

“Mm?”

“That friend I told you about? The one with a band?”

“Yeah.”

She lazily twisted a strand of Octavia’s hair around her finger, tight. Raven was starry-eyed.

“He’s going on tour. He invited me to come with.”

Raven laughed drunkenly. She hadn’t consumed any alcohol in three days.

“You don’t sing.”

“No, I know. But I can do makeup. Or groupie.”

They both giggled, Octavia’s heavy and Raven’s light, mixing in the sleepy air. 

“I can see it now, you with a big foam finger, #1 Lincoln Fan. Lincoln rubber bracelets, Lincoln tramp stamp above your ass. Except, then, how will you get laid?”

Octavia socked her in the shoulder lightly, pressing a warm kiss to it a moment later. Her words were almost muffled by Raven’s tepid skin.

“Foam finger. Ladies love big hands, right?”

“Gross.”

They dissolved. The moon never seemed more in place in the sky than it had then.

*

Raven walked into her apartment the next afternoon and the ghost in it was so loud Raven’s ears rang.

The couch was bare. Octavia’s blanket and textbooks were now a past rather than a present, and Raven had an impending feeling that they weren’t the only things the room was now spared of. 

Octavia’s canvas-white sheets were gone from her bed, bare mattress almost glowing in the furious early afternoon light. Her glossy makeup containers were swept off of the countertop of the bathroom, although the toothpaste stain she got on the wall last week was a turquoise teardrop on the wallpaper. 

Raven walked back into the kitchen. The sound of her own footsteps sounded faraway, as did her heartbeat. Her chest seared and the sun in the sky looked like a blind spot in the blue. 

A cup filled to the brim with the only thing left that Raven knew sat beside a piece of paper on the counter.

The minute Raven saw the note, she already knew what it said, before the writing was coherent and close enough for her eyes to make sense of it. She closed her eyes. She slid her fingers through her hair, fast then slow, padding back to her bedroom space at a sedate pace.

She was finally gone.

Raven climbed into bed with her clothes on, and waited for the sun to set again.

**Author's Note:**

> talk femslash to me on [tumblr](http://roinanlynch.tumblr.com)


End file.
